In the aftermath of Taft-Hartley, the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the American Federation of Labor reacted like any wounded animals would: they bared their teeth and became aggressive. Strikes were leveled at an unusually broad range of industries in 1948—“from the stock market to the stockyards,” one report on the situation noted. Coal miners stopped working in March, West Coast dockworkers went out in September, and longshoremen at East Coast ports hit the picket lines in November. Meanwhile, the United Auto Workers kicked off what it described as “an intensive organizational and educational drive” to cope with the passage of the “infamous” and “insidious” law, a campaign modeled on none other than General Motors’ own “My Job Contest.” The fliers promoting the union’s efforts weren’t nearly as slick as the ones that the company had produced for the MJC, but whatever they lacked in polish they made up for with the mordancy of the message: “GM Workers—Win a Prize Without Telling Any Lies.”
The aim, in this case, was to help Walter Reuther and his men meet the new realities of Taft-Hartley, which demanded that all union members now sign a card allowing their UAW dues to be pulled automatically from their paychecks. “Failure to promptly obtain these signed check-off cards seriously jeopardizes the welfare of our union,” the UAW warned. At the same time, the UAW was eager to attract as many new members as possible, concerned that Taft-Hartley had made it easier for rival unions to infiltrate GM and the other automakers. “A lot of the fellows we are after just haven’t been around long enough to feel the union in their bones—or in their hearts,” the UAW asserted. “They don’t remember what it was like in the not-so-good-old days. We have the answers for them. Take them back over the years. Corner them at lunch, or at the gate, or over a beer, and give it to them straight.… Let’s finish the job in GM. Let’s build the union. The UAW makes us strong—so let’s make the UAW stronger. A strong union is much more than an answer to Taft-Hartley. It’s a beachhead on the future we all want.”
The union’s prize drawing—open to anyone who joined the UAW, recruited a new member, or signed a dues check-off or union security card—was paltry compared with the MJC. In fact, the union could afford only a handful of inducements to dangle in front of workers: two automobiles (a Packard and a Ford), three Kelvinator refrigerators, and two Co-Op Home Freezers. Still, at least Reuther’s boys could add a little levity to the loot they had, displaying the Ford and the Packard in front of union headquarters in Detroit, in plain view of the General Motors Building across the street. “There’s a Ford in a GM Union Member’s Future,” a giant banner hanging outside the UAW offices proclaimed. It was all a poke at GM, which had refused to sell the UAW one of its own cars at a discount. The union even convinced one of the MJC winners, Delphia Baugh, to write an open letter supporting the UAW initiative. “I won a Buick in the ‘My Job Contest,’” said Baugh. “But just because I like my job does not mean that I think it cannot be improved.… I am going to try to sign up as many members as I possibly can in the UAW-CIO contest.”
In all, the campaign was a success, motivating more than 25,000 workers from GM plants to join the UAW—a bump in membership, said one union official, that “greatly strengthened the hand” of labor as it prepared for 1948 contract talks. The union played its cards determinedly, making an unprecedented 132 separate demands of GM and vowing to wage “the damnedest struggle ever.” Union negotiators pushed for a pay increase of twenty-five cents an hour, a guarantee of at least 40 hours a week of income, a pension plan for factory workers, and a new “social security” program that would provide a full 52 weeks of disability coverage, double the current level. “What to do about doctor bills and grocery bills when sickness or accident stop paychecks,” the UAW said, “is the top worry among autoworkers.”
The company, unmoved, anticipated another epic showdown. “We regarded these demands as extravagant beyond reason and feared that if the UAW persisted in them we would have another disastrous strike similar to the 1945–1946 one,” Alfred Sloan later recalled. There was, however, a saving grace: despite the caustic tenor of the UAW’s membership drive, the union agreed with GM to negotiate the new contract out of the public eye. “In previous years,” Sloan said, “our collective bargaining had come to resemble a public political forum in which the union fed a stream of provocative statements to the press, and we felt obliged to answer publicly. The privacy of the 1948 negotiations made their tone more realistic from the start.” Another factor may also have helped tamp down the rhetoric: some of the sharpest tongues in the room had been removed. On the company side, Harry Coen—who had accused Reuther of revealing “Socialistic desires” during the 1945 bargaining—had been replaced as GM’s labor-relations chief by Harry Anderson, an attorney with a more sophisticated style, and Louis Seaton, who was as blunt as a wrecking bar but known for keeping his composure. Then, on April 20, about five weeks into negotiations, Reuther was quieted as well. That’s when an assassin nearly killed him.
It was about ten at night, and Reuther had just returned to his home in Northwest Detroit from a UAW executive board meeting. When he went to fetch a bowl of peaches out of the refrigerator, a blast from a twelve-gauge shotgun tore through the kitchen window. The buckshot caught Reuther in the right arm and in the chest. Somehow, he stayed conscious and crawled onto the back porch. “Those dirty bastards!” he yelled. “They have to shoot a fellow in the back. They won’t come out in the open and fight.” The doctors pumped four pints of blood into him, as Reuther survived two and a half hours of surgery. No one would ever be arrested in the case, though Reuther himself always suspected that his Communist rivals in the UAW must have had a role in the attempted murder.
At the negotiating table in room 5–202 of the General Motors Building, the big breakthrough came in late May, following thirty-seven previous bargaining sessions. With UAW members having walked off the job at Chrysler just a week and a half earlier and the union’s strike deadline at GM looming, the strain was growing fast. But progress toward a settlement had stalled. And the talks had become so mind-numbing that Seaton switched to smoking cigars during the bargaining after noticing one day that three different cigarettes were burning in the ashtray in front of him. Now, he sought to stir things up, offering a new wage formula whose main goal was to make sure that workers’ wages didn’t keep falling behind rising prices.
In tangible terms, it meant that GM would give an hourly pay increase of eleven cents to 225,000 production employees—far less than the UAW had been seeking. Yet what was momentous was that eight cents of the total would be tied to the government’s Consumer Price Index and adjusted going forward so as to track the general cost of living. The other three cents, labeled an “annual improvement factor,” were supposed to reflect productivity gains at the company—an explicit linking of higher wages to higher output and stronger corporate performance. “I prefer to think of it as a group merit raise of sorts,” Sloan said.
The concept of a cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, was not new. In 1916, Kodak had increased pay for its workers based partly on a cost-of-living index that Marion Folsom had put together. In 1936, General Electric adopted a similar scheme, which in the face of mounting consumer prices soon helped to push the company’s wage rates to record levels. “The cost-of-living adjustment is automatic and will be paid without any necessity of complaint or collective bargaining on the part of employees,” GE announced. GM itself had flirted with a COLA in the mid-1930s, and Charlie Wilson then refined the plan in 1941. During the 1945 negotiations, GM offered a COLA—but the UAW rejected it, focusing instead on its call for “wage increases without price increases.”
Despite the UAW’s resistance, the COLA wasn’t just a corporate tool. Leon Trotsky, the Marxist leader, had popularized the notion among laborites in the late 1930s. And before the latest round of negotiations, a number of UAW locals were also insisting on a “sliding scale of wages” that would move in concert with consumer prices. But Reuther was incredulous—anxious, in particular, about what would happen if a postwar depression set in and prices began to flow in only one direction: downward. What’s more, observed Sloan, it seemed that union leaders “would prefer to play an active role in setting wages.” A COLA took away part of the UAW’s raison d’être.
Nevertheless, Reuther came around. Consulting with top aides from his bedside, where he was recuperating from his gunshot wounds, he blessed the 1948 agreement, persuaded by two things: First, the union negotiated a floor for the COLA, so that this portion of the formula could not fall below three cents. And second, the UAW could continue to press for a raise in the annual improvement factor in subsequent contracts. “Thus,” said Reuther, “the General Motors’ workers are not chained to the same standard of living. They are protected against increased living costs and at the same time make progress with respect to living standards. From now on our fight will be to increase and accelerate the extent of that progress.” As was his nature—and the nature of his position—Reuther pledged to keep battling “against the greedy industrialists.”
Yet the truth was, having a built-in COLA addressed a huge problem that had vexed GM’s workers—and the entire country, for that matter—since the end of the war: nonstop inflation. By late 1946, exploding prices had all but erased the wage increases won by the UAW and other unions the previous winter. Inflation continued to soar at a rate of nearly 20 percent through the first half of 1947, generating so much angst and anger among working Americans that they started to sing about it:
My mother gave me a penny
To buy some candy;
I didn’t buy no candy;
It cost a nickel.
A piece of penny candy,
It cost a nickel;
Oh, everything is higher;
It’s sure outrageous;
Yes, everything is higher;
Except my daddy’s wages.
My mother gave me a nickel
To buy a pickle;
I didn’t buy no pickle;
It cost a quarter.
A qua-qua-qua-qua quarter,
A little nickel pickle,
It cost a quarter.
My mother gave me a quarter
For seltzer water;
I didn’t buy no water;
It cost a dollar.
A da-da-da-da dollar;
It cost a dollar;
For bubbles in the water,
It cost a dollar.
My mother gave me a dollar
So I wouldn’t holler;
But you should hear me holler,
’Cause what can you buy with a dollar?
Ultimately, Reuther defended the COLA as “a tremendous victory”—a stance made all the easier by Charlie Wilson’s inclination to stick up for the union on this one. Wilson remained, all in all, plenty hard-bitten. Heading into the 1948 talks, for example, he had lashed out at organized labor, condemning the nation’s industrial unions as “the most powerful monopolies that have ever existed in our country… operating with little or no regard for the public interest.” But on the issue of inflation, Wilson showed the progressive streak that set him apart from so many of his colleagues at GM and throughout much of corporate America. Most executives castigated big labor’s insatiable hunger for higher pay and blamed inflation on the “wage-price spiral.” Wilson, though, would hear none of it. “The working people did not make that inflation,” he said. “They only want to catch up with it in order to pay their grocery bills. I contend that present high wages are more the result of fundamental inflationary money pressures than of unreasonable wage pressures by the union.” He added: “Arrangements like ours, for lifting and lowering wages in step with the cost of living are commonly called ‘escalator clauses.’ They are attacked by people who insist upon talking about the ‘wage-price spiral.’ We should say the ‘price-wage spiral.’ For it is not primarily wages that push up prices, it is primarily prices that pull up wages.”
With the COLA, then, Reuther and Wilson found themselves side by side, absorbing flak from both the left and the right. A representative of the American Federation of Labor called the COLA “a violation of the whole philosophy of progress,” and the United Mine Workers criticized the GM-UAW settlement as “a definite backward move.” In 1912, the miners had eliminated COLAs from their contracts after finding that companies had manipulated the price of coal—to which wages were pegged—and “the workers were gypped by the sliding scale.” For its part, the National Association of Manufacturers also raised questions about the logic of a COLA, and Barron’s considered it “a vicious mechanism.” One survey of executives found that four in five believed that such a formula would not work in their industry, half thought it would have unfavorable competitive effects, and three out of four felt that it would be inflationary. Wilson professed to take comfort in being hammered from all directions. “Frankly, I am personally encouraged by criticism from such extreme points of view,” he said, “and I feel that perhaps we have found a safe middle ground.” Besides, as much as any company in America, GM was a pacesetter in the area of human relations, having “initiated labor trends in the past,” Business Week pointed out. Although the COLA “is still so new that it may not have immediate acceptance in many other managements,” the magazine said, “GM is betting blue chips that eventually it will be.” And it was. By the early 1960s, COLAs would be incorporated into about half of all union contracts nationwide and spread as well into the pay packages of various white-collar workers, including government employees and retirees, and Social Security beneficiaries.
Yet the significance of the 1948 GM-UAW contract lay not only in its substance but also in its symbolism. It signaled the beginning of the end of the incessant warring in which American labor and management had engaged through most of the 1930s and ’40s. The political scientist Samuel Lubell could sense the change when he dropped in on a UAW local in Detroit in 1940 and then again in 1948. By the time of his second visit, he said, “the strike photographs had come down from the bulletin boards and had been replaced by idyllic snapshots of the union’s annual outings and sporting events.… The ‘class-conscious’ educational director was gone—ousted in the UAW-wide fight against Communists which Walter Reuther led. On their desks, the new officers had propped the slogan, ‘UAW Americanism for Us.’ They were wearing green jackets and green silk legion caps. In 1940 the flavor of the local was one of street barricades and sit-down strikes; eight years later, it was almost like a lodge hall.”
In May 1950, still riding these amicable feelings, GM and the UAW reached a new contract that would extend for half a decade—an unparalleled time span that promised to “have a stabilizing influence not only on our business but on the economy of the whole country,” Wilson said. “We believe that removing the fear or possibility of a strike for five years is a tremendously constructive achievement for our employees and their families, our business, our dealers, our suppliers, and the general public. The settlement should mean that all concerned can face the future with added confidence.”
All told, the contract guaranteed GM’s autoworkers a 20 percent increase in their standard of living by 1955. The “Treaty of Detroit,” as Fortune magazine famously called it, would accomplish this, first, by continuing the COLA—a crucial reaffirmation of the basic formula set in 1948, even though the way that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics calculated the Consumer Price Index led to a fair bit of consternation for both GM and the UAW. The agreement also added an annual improvement factor of four cents for every year it was in force. In addition, it gave GM’s blue-collar employees enhanced life, sickness, and accident insurance, new hospitalization and surgical coverage, and, in an enormous triumph for the UAW, pensions to which the company would contribute at least $1.50 per month for each year of service up to thirty years. Reuther and the leaders of other unions, especially the Mine Workers and the Steelworkers, had been persistently pursuing the creation and expansion of health, welfare, and retirement funds since the end of the war—a cause bolstered by a 1949 Supreme Court decision, involving Inland Steel, which held that such benefits were subject to collective bargaining.
In addition to these economic gains, the UAW also obtained a version of the “union security” clause that it had been coveting since its membership drive in early 1948. In return, Reuther and his men agreed that “a continuing improvement in the standard of living depends upon technological progress… and a cooperative attitude on the part of all parties”—an open acknowledgment of what lay at the core of the social contract: that the union and its members had to help keep the corporate machine purring if they themselves were to thrive.
On a day-to-day level, the Treaty of Detroit augured something else: a newfound equanimity in how labor and management would interact. “This kind of collective bargaining calls for intelligent trading rather than table-pounding, for diplomacy rather than belligerency, and for internal union discipline rather than grassroots rank-and-file activity,” the labor economist Frederick Harbison commented, adding that the GM-UAW agreement should help bring a welcome calm “throughout the mass-production industries.” One union leader went so far as to complain that, when asked in 1950 to help draft a platform for a state CIO meeting, he had nothing much to reach for. “Ten or fifteen years ago,” he said, “I would have welcomed the assignment. There were so many things I was mad about. But what can I agitate for now? We don’t have any really big issues left.”
For Charlie Wilson, such contentment was very much the intention. “It is our hope,” he said, “that this agreement will set a pattern for bargaining based on principles that will ensure industrial peace and prosperity and minimize strife and industrial warfare.” And indeed it would—sort of.
In the grandest sense, the GM-UAW contract helped to usher in the era of industrial peace that Wilson had envisioned, and many would come to see the 1950s as a Golden Age of American business, in no small part because of the accommodation that labor and management had reached. The United Mine Workers also signed multiyear pacts with coal operators in 1950, setting the stage for thirteen years of tranquility in company towns across Kentucky, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and elsewhere. “Coal can offer more value and better service if it has an opportunity to settle down and really work,” Ivan Given, the editor of the trade journal Coal Age, wrote. “With the 1950 contracts appreciably broadening that opportunity, the situation can be truly described as a new start.” The rubber industry likewise experienced a stretch of harmonious relations through the 1950s, and even the steel industry—where work stoppages had occurred every three years since the early forties—had by the end of the decade hit upon a no-strike posture that would last for the next quarter of a century. “I never went on strike in my life, I never ordered anyone else to run a strike in my life, I never had anything to do with a picket line,” said George Meany, who served as president of the AFL and then as president of the AFL-CIO when the two labor federations merged in 1955. “In the final analysis, there is not a great deal of difference between the things I stand for and the things that the National Association of Manufacturers stands for.”
Still, for all of these indications of reconciliation, “peace” between employer and employee remained a relative concept. Even at GM, the volume of grievances increased more than fivefold in the ten years after the 1950 contract was signed. Across American industry, the intensity of work stoppages did drop in the 1950s, so that about 4 percent of those employed participated in some kind of walkout during the decade, down from more than 10 percent during the strike wave of 1946. But that still meant millions of workers were involved in strikes in any given year.
“The problem is not one of whether or not there will be labor peace,” the industrial psychologist Robert McMurry wrote in Harvard Business Review. “Fundamentally, there can never be true peace in the sense of a total integration of goals and objectives; the underlying interests of the parties are too greatly at variance.… The real question is not how to avoid or prevent labor warfare, but how to confine it within manageable bounds.”
For decades, this tug-of-war “within manageable bounds” would go on. Different companies dealt with unions in different ways, whether by trying to outfox them during negotiations or by casting doubts in the minds of the rank-and-file about whether they even needed representation. Some employers played nice; others were nasty. But because of their ability to act collectively—even after Taft-Hartley—workers across the economy were able to counterbalance the inherent strength of corporate America. This would translate into higher wages, better benefits, and improved working conditions not only for those who carried a union card but for millions more blue-collar workers whose employers followed the patterns set by organized labor. Benefit packages for millions of nonunion white-collar workers would also be based on what unfolded at the bargaining table. In short, the nation never would have had so many good jobs without unions.
Winning these good jobs never came easily, however. The constant push and pull between labor and management often drained both sides. At a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Cumberland, Maryland, for example, tensions had been brewing since the summer of 1951, when the Teamsters began trying to organize the factory.
The prospect of unionization so spooked the southern clan that owned the place that the patriarch made a special trip to Western Maryland to address the rank-and-file—a rare personal appearance by Walter Sams. He appealed to the same logic of loyalty that Kodak’s George Eastman and GM’s Donaldson Brown had before him: the company and its workers had a commonality of interests, Sams suggested, and nobody from the outside needed to get in the middle of the deal.
“I have been married thirty-six years and sometimes my wife and I become confused,” Sams said. “Now, when we do, we don’t call in a neighbor.… We are in a business partnership, so we discuss the matter and get things straightened out.… We are a big family. Certainly if I eat, you are going to eat. If I stay warm, you will stay warm too.”
Sams went on, beseeching his salesmen to get out there and peddle hard, pushing far beyond the 400,000 cases of soft drinks that they currently sold each year to area grocery stores, restaurants, hotels, filling stations, and other businesses. “There is no reason why this plant cannot go to 600,000 cases,” he said, “and I know every man here is going to benefit by it.” With that, Sams requested that everyone pause for a moment for—what else?—a thirst-quenching drink of Coca-Cola; it was a sweltering day outside, with temperatures topping ninety. Then he agreed to take questions “about money or anything else.”
The dialogue that followed was not exactly hostile. But slowly, the complaints seeped out, like fizz from a shaken bottle of soda. One salesman asked Sams why the men had to work holidays. Another questioned whether he was working too many routes at once. “We don’t have time to turn around,” he told the boss. Another said he’d had only one raise in five years. Another said the work he was getting wasn’t steady enough. At each turn, Sams responded with a mix of firmness, spelling out what he saw as economic reality, and benevolence. “Nothing pertaining to you and your happiness is unimportant to me,” he said.
The outreach by Sams made little difference. The Teamsters succeeded in calling for an election, which the National Labor Relations Board slated for late September. The company mailed letters to the nineteen salesmen and laborers eligible to vote—a no-holds-barred effort to remind them how good they had it. “Certainly you have security in your job,” the letter said. “You have, in addition to a normal weekly wage, other benefits which do not cost you one penny. These are group insurance, hospitalization insurance, and an opportunity to join a pension plan to take care of you at age sixty-five or before.… You are given your full pay when out for sickness. Uniforms and uniform laundry are provided without charge. You have never been forgotten at Christmas.… Are you very sure that you do not desire to retain your capacity to act as an individual in all matters pertaining to your welfare in so far as your employment with this company is concerned? How can your situation be improved by turning over your leadership to those who are unfamiliar with your local and personal problems, as well as the problems which beset the management of this company?”
Coca-Cola’s plea fell flat. By a count of fourteen to five, the workers in Cumberland made Teamsters Local 453 their bargaining agent. And by October, the union was making demands—first and foremost, a call for a 15 percent rise in wages. The company said there was no way to afford such an increase, especially given its unwillingness to charge its customers more. “The greatest single factor in Coca-Cola’s success today,” it told the Teamsters, “is that we are able to maintain a retail price of five cents.” Animosity deepened. The union alleged that the company was refusing to bargain in good faith. “The employees had been notified that as long as they belonged to the union, the company will not grant any increases but will grant them increases when they discontinue their membership,” the Teamsters reported to the NLRB. Negotiations picked up again in early 1952, but by spring, things had fallen apart. The Teamsters struck on May 10.
The complexion of the fight—a stalemate over local wages involving fewer than two dozen workers—was revealing: although mass strikes by the Auto Workers, Electrical Workers, and so on grabbed the headlines, the majority of the work stoppages in America have always been small, involving fewer than a hundred employees. And yet the small conflicts can get every bit as ugly as the big ones. In Cumberland, Sams and his managers tried to keep their customers stocked with Coca-Cola by having nearby plants serve them. But the Teamsters weren’t about to make things easy. Union goons assaulted two salesmen from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, on May 21, as they stopped to get gasoline. “Unload the damn truck!” one of the union men shouted, as his five associates smashed three cases of empty Coca-Cola bottles. “Beat their damn brains out!” another of the attackers yelled. The cab door flew open, and a barrage of fists rained down on the salesman behind the wheel before he managed to drive away.
By August, the strike was turning into a war of attrition. The company had made several counter-offers to the Teamsters, but the most it put on the table was a 6 percent boost in wages—less than half the amount that the union had initially sought. The Teamsters dug in. Each day, eight or so pickets lined up in front of the factory. “They are bound to wear out eventually,” Roy Lottig, the manager of the Cumberland plant, told Sams.
September turned to October, October to November, and November to December. Finally, a few weeks before Christmas, a deal was reached, with wage gains of 6 percent to 8 percent, depending on the job classification. The union seemed relieved. Coca-Cola was miffed. On paper, the contract was set to remain in force for a year, but the company was already plotting how to toss the Teamsters—and its strongest backers from among the rank-and-file—before the plant could even get up and running again. “I wake up at night worrying about how I am going to handle those S.O.B.s when we do open,” Lottig told Sams. “They know I will never let up until I nail each and every one of them.”
By late in the year, Sams and Lottig were right where they wanted to be: on the verge of dislodging the Teamsters from the plant. The company cancelled its labor contract in December 1953, a month after petitioning the NLRB for a new election, confident that a majority of workers no longer supported the union. In March 1954, the vote was held, and this time the company came out on top. Labor peace had arrived in Cumberland, but by way of a far different kind of strategy than GM’s: the Teamsters had been snuffed out.
The outcome, while affecting few people and isolated in scope, laid bare two essential truths about labor relations in America in the 1950s: First, lots of workers didn’t want to be organized. From the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s, unions won 83 percent of the representation elections held in America. But their “win rate” was now approaching 70 percent—and falling fast. During a later walkout, at a Coca-Cola plant in Boston, one worker expressed his distaste for the Teamsters in a poem he called “The Wail of the Picket: The Coke Man’s Psalm.” It began by referring to the union shop steward, a fellow named Gildea:
Gildea is my shepherd; I am in want.
He maketh me to sit in parked autos; he picketeth me before still Coke plants.
He emptyeth my bank account; he leadeth me in the path of unemployment, for his union’s sake.
Yea, though I march at the end of the picket line, I will fear no evil Coke company; for Gildea art with me. Thou mouth and thy pipe comfort me.
Thou preparest a contract before me in the presence of mine union brothers: thou filleth my head with nonsense; now my cup runneth empty.
Surely misery and poverty shall follow me all the days of his strike: and I will dwell in a leaky tent forever.
Second, despite the giddy reaction in the press to the Treaty of Detroit and pronouncements by corporate leaders that organized labor was now a welcome part of the business landscape, many executives continued to loathe unions (even if they wouldn’t always say so in polite company). “If American management, upon retiring for the night, were assured that by the next morning the unions with which they dealt would have disappeared,” two experts from MIT told the Industrial Relations Research Association, “more management people than not would experience the happiest sleep of their lives.”
Sams, for sure, was poised to have a wonderful rest in light of the Teamsters’ ouster. “With our troubles out of the way,” he said, “we should certainly be able to begin showing better results” as a business. Lottig was pleased, too, and hopeful that the union wouldn’t return anytime soon. “I feel that I have so many loyal men now,” he said, “that all of us would sense any inkling of trouble in the future.”
If it seemed presumptuous that workers would be as loyal to their place of employment as Roy Lottig indicated, he wasn’t the only one thinking this way. In late 1953, as Coca-Cola Bottling scuffled with the Teamsters, the US Supreme Court had made it clear: companies were to be governed by a spirit of “cooperation, continuity of service, and cordial contractual relation between employer and employee that is born of loyalty to their common enterprise.”
This conception of loyalty, with workers and their bosses coming together in the quest for something larger than themselves, had deep roots in the American tradition. “What we want… from some of the managers of great corporate interests is more loyalty, and less of the individualism of those who seek power,” the philosopher Josiah Royce wrote in 1908. “And I myself should say that precisely the same sort of loyalty is what we want from both the leaders and from the followers of organized labor.” Now, with the Supreme Court’s ruling, the heart of the social contract—an allegiance between worker and employer based on what was supposed to be their mutual aspiration to see the business succeed—was no longer just the emergent ethos of corporate life; it was the law of the land.
The case that came before the high court grew out of an incident that began in the summer of 1949, when contract negotiations broke down between the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and WBT, the radio and television station in Charlotte, North Carolina, owned by the Jefferson Standard Broadcasting Company. The lone sticking point between them was whether the IBEW would have the right to bring in an outside arbitrator in the event that the station fired one of the fourteen broadcast technicians represented by the union. The IBEW said this was a question of job security, since there was no way to protect its members from being dismissed capriciously—“for any reason, whether just or unjust.” Company officials framed the issue completely differently: “If we are going to be able to run our business, we certainly think that we should have the right to decide who shall be our employees and whether we shall keep a person in our employment or not.”
The technicians didn’t strike. But they began picketing outside the station in July and sent taunting telegrams to management: “Every day you lose measurable amount of dollars and immeasurable amounts of prestige. What does it cost us? Just a little beneficial exercise by being exposed to fresh air and sunshine.” Then, on August 24, the IBEW turned up the heat. It openly questioned whether Jefferson Standard’s brand new TV service—the first in the Carolinas—was delivering high enough quality.
“Is Charlotte a Second-Class City?” the union’s handbill read. “You might think so from the kind of television programs being presented by the Jefferson Standard Broadcasting Company over WBTV. Have you seen one of their television programs lately? Did you know that all the programs presented over WBTV are on film and may be from one day to five years old? There are no local programs presented by WBTV. You cannot receive the local baseball games, football games, or other local events because WBTV does not have the proper equipment to make these pickups. Cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington receive such programs nightly. Why doesn’t the Jefferson Standard Broadcasting Company purchase the needed equipment to bring you the same type of programs enjoyed by other leading American cities? Could it be that they consider Charlotte a second-class community and only entitled to the pictures now being presented to them?” The handbill—some 5,000 of which were distributed around town—was signed, “WBT Technicians.”
For Jefferson Standard, which only a month earlier had unveiled this “new thing called television” before thousands of locals packed into the Charlotte Armory, the technicians’ charges were more than embarrassing. The whole uproar was starting to cost money. “We are losing some business here in Charlotte because of the mix-up between the engineers and WBT,” a salesman for the company’s life-insurance division told headquarters. “These boys are walking the streets in front of the building passing out leaflets, and some people are getting a little bitter taste toward Jefferson Standard.”
On September 3, WBT fired the ten technicians it believed responsible for distributing the handbills. “Ever since early July, while you have been walking up and down the street with placards and literature attacking us,” Charles Crutchfield, the station’s general manager, wrote to each of those who were dismissed, “you have continued to hold your job and receive your pay.… Even when you began to put out propaganda which contained many untruths about our company and a great deal of personal abuse and slander, we still continued to treat you exactly as before. For it has been our understanding that under our labor laws, you have a very great latitude in trying to make the public believe that your employer is unfair to you. Now, however, you have turned from trying to persuade the public that we are unfair to you and are trying to persuade the public that we give inferior service to them. While we are struggling to expand into and develop a new field… you are busy trying to turn customers and the public against us in every possible way, even handing out leaflets on the public streets advertising that our operations are ‘second-class,’ and endeavoring in various ways to hamper and totally destroy our business. Certainly we are not required by law or common sense to keep you in our employment and pay you a substantial salary while you thus do your best to tear down and bankrupt our business.”
Over the next couple of months, both sides pressed their case. The union started a postcard campaign, urging people to tell Southern Dairies, Interstate Milling, Shell Oil, Brown & Williamson Tobacco, and other businesses large and small to stop advertising on WBT because of the station’s “inexcusable” action of having “unjustly discharged ten engineers for union activity.” The company countered with its own mailer, telling all who would listen: “If any employer was ever justified in discharging employees, we were.” Through the fall of 1949—while WBT broadcast a test pattern with news and weather announcements during the day, and Kukla, Fran, and Ollie; The Perry Como Show; Hopalong Cassidy; and other fare aired at night—the war of words between the company and the union ground on.
Then in early 1950, it nearly became a war on a whole different scale: police arrested Sterling Hicks, the local IBEW business manager, and charged him with conspiring to dynamite WBT’s 435-foot-tall AM transmission tower. Acting on a tip, the cops first arrested another man as he was in the act of hurling five sticks of dynamite, their fuses lit, at the intended target. (The authorities had earlier discovered the cache of explosives, hidden under a pile of leaves, and removed the percussion caps, rendering them harmless.) The man, a part-time housepainter, told police that Hicks had hired him to bring down the steel structure for $250. Hicks, who was well-known in the community not only for his union duties but also as a deacon of his church and a member of Charlotte’s parks and recreation commission, denied involvement. But he was eventually convicted and ordered to serve two years in state prison.
As Hicks’s conspiracy case wound its way through the legal system, so did the union’s case against Jefferson Standard. In August 1950, an NLRB trial examiner ruled that the company had engaged in certain unfair labor practices and recommended that the technicians who were fired be reinstated in their old jobs. The company objected, and in June 1951 the full NLRB went against its own trial examiner’s findings and, by a four-to-one vote, ruled in Jefferson Standard’s favor. The board reasoned that the technicians’ broadside—“Is Charlotte a Second-Class City?”—fell outside the scope of the IBEW’s labor dispute with WBT, and therefore, the workers weren’t entitled to protection under federal law. “In our judgment,” the NLRB wrote in its decision, “these tactics… were hardly less ‘indefensible’ than acts of physical sabotage.” The crux of the technicians’ argument, the board added, was that “the employer ought to be boycotted because he offered a shoddy product to the consuming public—not because he was ‘unfair’ to the employees who worked on that product.”
Next it was the union’s turn to try to have things reversed, and in November 1952 it won. The federal Court of Appeals in Washington, on narrow technical grounds, sent the entire matter back to the NLRB for reconsideration. The NLRB and the company then took up the game of judicial ping-pong, appealing the DC Circuit’s ruling. The Supreme Court agreed to take it on, and arguments were heard in October 1953. Two months later, Justice Harold Burton issued his opinion for the six-to-three majority. Jefferson Standard was totally vindicated.
“There is no more elemental cause for discharge of an employee,” wrote Burton, a Truman nominee, “than disloyalty to his employer.” That line, more than any other, reverberated through the media: “Test in Firing: Loyalty to Firm,” read the headline in US News & World Report. “Loyalty to the Boss,” said Newsweek. North Carolina’s Greensboro Free Press cheered the high court’s decision in an editorial: “If the time ever comes that an employer cannot dismiss an employee for open disloyalty, particularly when that disloyalty strikes at the existence of the employer, we might as well call off the dogs and let the Reds take over.”
Although Burton’s opinion also referred to the fact that loyalty was supposed to be a two-way street, in the furtherance of the employer and employee’s “common enterprise,” that aspect of the decision didn’t receive much attention. Instead, people seemed to put the onus squarely on the employee. A few weeks after the Supreme Court made its ruling, one of the technicians who’d picketed WBT, Robert Hilker, wrote to Crutchfield. “I was a little young when I worked for WBT to understand both sides of the picture,” Hilker said. “Even after leaving there it took several weeks to see anything but a one-sided view. However, in about six months’ time, things gradually changed and looked different to me. And, frankly, after a year’s time I was at a point where I began to think you were a pretty intelligent fellow for getting rid of the whole bunch. Now, after three years, I wonder why you didn’t fire the bunch of us sooner.… If you ever need any help holding down any other problem ‘children,’ I’ll be glad to explain to them publicly or privately why ‘not to bite the hand that feeds you.’” Another of the fired technicians, A. O. “Buster” Richardson, wrote a similar letter to Crutchfield—and asked to return to WBT. “I’m truly sorry for acting like a headstrong ‘child’ and being such a fool,” he said. “If you do see fit to rehire me I will do my level best to make you and the company a good man, and cause nobody no trouble and give the company my full loyalty.” Richardson, alas, never got his job back.
Somewhere between GM’s embrace of the UAW and Coca-Cola Bottling’s thrashing of the Teamsters, General Electric carved out a third course for dealing with its unions: it tried to end-run them. The playbook for this move was commissioned by “Electric Charlie” Wilson, the company’s president, and drawn up by his chief spinmeister, Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, whose name more than any other—save, perhaps, for Taft and Hartley—would come to be reviled among the nation’s union leaders. The New York Times called him “the author of the most controversial labor-relations program in a major industry.” Boulware described himself, only half-jokingly, as “the tough guy of General Electric who went around frightening little children and grown men.” Yet for a moment in time, in 1955, even Lem Boulware could look like a peacemaker.
Born in Springfield, Kentucky, in 1895, Boulware had learned at a young age what hard work was like, thanks to his father’s uncompromising sense of discipline. “When I was caught loitering in front of the drugstore or pool room with no paying job immediately in sight,” Boulware recounted, “I was dispatched promptly to a farm he had handy. This interfered greatly with baseball, fishing, and quail shooting.” Through high school, he held all manner of jobs—at a bank, grocery, harness shop, butcher, tobacco market, and water and light plant. Boulware graduated in 1916 from the University of Wisconsin, where he captained the baseball team, and then briefly taught accounting and commercial law. He served as an infantry officer during World War I and later became sales manager at the Easy Washing Machine Company. He went on to be vice president and general manager of two other manufacturers, Carrier Corporation and Celotex, and also had a stint as a vice chairman of the War Production Board, where he worked with Wilson. In January 1945, Boulware joined GE as a consultant to Wilson on marketing and merchandising. He was also put in charge of the company’s affiliated manufacturing operations, which sold products under their own brands. Then came the big strike of 1946 by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, which changed everything—for Lem Boulware and for GE and its employees.
The raw power shown by the UE stunned Wilson and his fellow executives. Hundreds of pickets encircled GE factories around the country, keeping just about everyone, including white-collar workers, from entering. Wilson seemed to take it personally. “To me,” he said, “it is the height of stupidity that we, as a corporation, should not be allowed to get into our plants, people who are not members of the union.” Even worse, the strikers—not the company—captured the public’s sympathy and support. Restaurants delivered hot lunches to the picket lines. College students walked alongside the strikers. Politicians championed the union cause. In Bloomfield, New Jersey, seven local policemen helped lead a union rally, while a band from the American Legion post played in the strikers’ parade. The town’s mayor opened with this invocation: “Help us so that when we pray each day, ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ the ‘us’ will include all people.” In the end, GE followed the national pattern and settled with the UE for a wage increase of eighteen and a half cents—all while having been made out to be the bad guy. Yet one part of the company had altogether sidestepped the ignominy: Boulware’s affiliated operations. There, conspicuously, no workers had struck.
As Boulware would later tell it, with no small amount of dramatic flair, he was caught totally off guard when Wilson called him into his office one day in May 1947 and informed him that as of Monday he was to drop everything he was doing and take on a new job: “finding a more rewarding approach to General Electric’s employee-relations problem.” “All this was quite a shock to me,” Boulware said, adding that he “weakly reminded” Wilson that “I had no experience in the field.” In truth, Boulware had been contemplating how to neutralize the unions’ message machine since shortly after his arrival at GE.
According to Boulware, GE was in “the ridiculous situation where—despite the best of intentions and the best practices known—the company” has become “distrusted and disapproved of by employees and neighbors in some very important matters,” as the 1946 strike “so clearly demonstrated.” To turn things around, Boulware adopted the role he knew best: that of a salesman. He devised a method of “job marketing” for “job customers,” in which GE would first research what its employees “wanted in their jobs and how they felt their present jobs fell short of their desires.” Said Boulware: “We tried to diagnose what they consciously liked and disliked about their jobs; what they understood, misunderstood, or just didn’t know or ignored about their jobs. We inquired into what they did not understand about the economic, social, and political influences which surrounded their jobs with opportunities, obligations, and limitations. We looked for the motives and beliefs which determined whether they gave their full interest, skill, care, and effort while working, and the events and impressions that determined whether they went home reasonably satisfied with their accomplishments and associations at the end of the day.”
From these extensive worker interviews, Boulware fashioned a 9-point checklist that, as he put it, “General Electric employees wanted their job package… to contain”:
1. Compensation, including “pay that is right—all things considered—for the skill, care, and full day’s effort as measured by reasonable modern standards,” as well as pensions, insurance, and other “extra financial benefits.”
2. Working conditions that are “as good as they can be made at the moment” and “regularly improved.”
3. Supervision that is “technically competent” and able to elucidate the reasons behind any management decision, as well as give good advice.
4. Job security “to the greatest degree possible.”
5. Respect “for basic human dignity.”
6. Promotion “as fast as opportunities arise or can be created and on a strictly fair basis.”
7. Information “on management’s objectives, plans, problems, successes, and failures.”
8. Belief in “the individual job’s importance, significance, and challenge, and in the employee’s contributions to the great good accomplished by the final GE product.”
9. Satisfaction derived “from going home to the family after a hard day’s work with the feeling that something important has been accomplished.”
To help sell his 9-point plan, Boulware developed a 120-page guide for GE’s 12,000 foremen and 3,000 other members of the company’s managerial staff. The bulk of the manual, he noted, was “devoted to overcoming employee objections to giving full skill, care, and effort” on the job: that is, to the workers’ half of the social contract. Buttressing management’s pitch was one of the most elaborate propaganda campaigns ever undertaken by a corporation, replete with films, posters, handbills, and letters home. Week in and week out, Boulware also flooded GE’s employee newspapers with cartoons and stories that both conveyed the company’s point of view and ripped the unions’: “General Electric Keeps Trying to Make Jobs Better,” “Steady Jobs Through Steady Friends,” “We Will Keep Trying to Do Right—About Your Pensions, Insurance, and Pay,” “Who Is Telling the Truth—and Who Isn’t?” GE’s executives were ecstatic about the corporate agitprop. “It is the kind of straightforward, hard-hitting, factual material that I think we should have been directing to our employees for a long time,” Robert S. Peare, a GE vice president, told Boulware in December 1947.
Like any good salesman, Boulware knew he wouldn’t get very far if he didn’t actually have a decent product to sell; it couldn’t all be bombast. And so he made sure that GE followed through on at least some of its promises, overhauling the salary structure for the company’s 15,000 managers to bring it more in sync with the overall market. The effect was to raise the pay of many employees whose compensation had long been neglected. For GE’s 120,000 unionized workers, however, the story was far more complicated. Boulware maintained: “We are not antiunion or prounion. We are proemployee.” In reality, GE was fervently antiunion—a disposition stemming from Boulware’s deep suspicion of anything he felt inhibited unfettered capitalism. This bottomless faith in laissez-faire doctrine fueled Boulware’s other sales effort: flogging the “creativeness, efficiency… and essential humanity of the ‘private sector’” while tearing down the “inevitable stultification, wastefulness, and dictatorial regimentation of the ‘public sector.’”
For Boulware, these two crusades—one ballyhooing GE’s treatment of its employees, the other “a ceaseless education campaign in the ideology of the free market,” as the historian Kim Phillips-Fein has written—were inseparable. If workers would only understand the basic tenets of America’s economic system, Boulware figured, they would better appreciate that the company was doing all it could for them. To help make his case, Boulware regularly distributed pie charts and statistical tables showing where every dollar of GE revenue went. During one typical quarter, for example, 42.6 cents was passed to outside suppliers, 36.4 cents to employees (in the form of wages and benefits), 15.1 cents to the government in taxes, 3.1 cents for reinvestment back into the company, and 2.8 cents to shareholders. The lesson, in Boulware’s words, was unmistakable: “General Electric was not a toe-to-toe struggle between an employee ‘class’ and an owner ‘class.’ It was a sort of clearinghouse where people came together to do things for each other” by contributing their respective resources, whether capital or labor.
In turn, it was up to GE to look out for “the balanced best interests of all”: its customers, shareowners, employees, and the communities in which it operated. This way of thinking—which would be upended in the coming decades, as maximizing shareholder wealth was put ahead of all other considerations—was far from exclusive to GE. Gen. Robert E. Wood, the chief executive of Sears, said “the four parties to any business” were, “in order of importance”: customers, employees, community, and stockholders. Johnson & Johnson said its “first responsibility” was to “the doctors, nurses, and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.” It next listed its employees, communities, and stockholders as those to whom it also had a responsibility. General Motors said it was “in business to make a profit,” so that “over the long term” it could “pay for research and improved tools and methods” in order to make better products for its customers; “provide jobs and opportunities for employees”; “earn a satisfactory return for investors”; “help others progress, including dealers and suppliers”; and “pay our share of the heavy cost of government.” And Kodak said it was guided by SPICE: an attempt to serve Shareowners, the Public Interest, Customers, and Employees.
Not all of Boulware’s teachings were so benign, however. Much of economics, unlike physics or astronomy, isn’t value-free science. And Boulware infused GE’s take on the subject with the specter of “socialist enemies,” a group into which he lumped “Roosevelt, Truman, Reuther, and their ilk.” His ultimate ambition was to turn GE’s workforce, some 200,000 strong, into an activist army that would help disseminate his conservative gospel and, over time, elect into public office like-minded politicians who would help foster a better business climate. The way to get there, said Boulware, whose deep voice retained a trace of his Kentucky twang, was to help GE’s workers and others whom the company touched “learn more thoroughly the arithmetic of our way of life… to realize the wonders of both the mechanics and results of our free system.”
Assisting Boulware with his antitax, antigovernment proselytizing was a beloved Hollywood star who had started out as a proud Democrat and union leader but would, under Boulware’s tutelage, become a passionate conservative. For eight years, beginning in 1954, Ronald Reagan hosted the Sunday-night TV show General Electric Theater and also served as a roving corporate ambassador, speaking to employees (and sometimes their neighbors) at GE’s 139 plants across the nation. “For almost two centuries,” Reagan told those at GE, “we have proved man’s capacity for self-government, but today we are told that we must choose between a left and right or, as others suggest, a third alternative, a kind of safe middle ground. I suggest to you there is no left or right, only an up or down—up to the maximum of individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”
Reagan, who as the country’s fortieth president would have a profound impact on the social contract between employer and employee, called his time at GE his “postgraduate course in political science.” Others must have felt as if they were in school as well. GE employees—white- and blue-collar alike—received as part of Boulware’s program a specially commissioned economics textbook written by Lewis Haney, a harsh critic of the New Deal. Boulware encouraged the company’s managers to read the Wall Street Journal editorial page, William Buckley’s columns in the National Review, and The Freeman, a journal published by the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education. A number of tracts from conservative standard-bearers, such as Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, were put on recommended reading lists. All managers received a copy of John T. Flynn’s The Road Ahead, which cautioned that “our American system is being destroyed not merely by Communist conspirators” but by those who had set the country on a track toward Socialism. “The Communist would like to ruin the American system by clubbing it over the head,” Flynn wrote. “The Socialist planner would like to do it by slow poison.”
GE borrowed and put its workers through a DuPont course called “How Our Business System Operates,” while Boulware also had thousands of GE supervisors attend an additional series of classes on “the basic facts about our industrial system.” Leading them was Neil Carothers, the head of the business school at Lehigh University and a darling of the far-right American Liberty League. At GE, he lectured on “The Nature of Production,” “What Sets Wages?” “The Distribution of Wealth,” and “Popular Economic Errors.” But he saved some of his most strident opinions for the course on “Labor and Management.” A hundred years earlier, during the Second Industrial Revolution, employers did abuse their workers, Carothers posited. But now, he said, “it is the workers who hate and attack management,” especially when goaded by unions. As he related it, “Thousands of workers whose livings depend entirely on the men who supply the capital and take the risks of enterprise have been led by propaganda to picture these owners and hired managers as Shylocks and exploiters.” The unions’ enmity, Carothers added, stemmed from memories of those dark days of the nineteenth century, “even though the majority of American employers have long since learned that fair treatment of labor is good policy not only for decency’s sake but good policy from the standpoint of profits.”
All of this must have been quite dizzying for James Carey, the union chief who had found common ground with Gerard Swope in the late 1930s. As the young president of the United Electrical and Radio Workers of America, he hadn’t taken a direct part in too many bargaining sessions with the company. But he became much more involved after the Communist-led UE splintered and he founded the International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, or IUE, in 1949. Like Walter Reuther, Carey had gone from being in league with Communists and Communist sympathizers earlier in his career to ardently opposing them, as the IUE and UE battled it out at one manufacturing plant after another for the right to represent GE (as well as Westinghouse) employees. “American Workers Want No Part of UE’s Reds!” a standard piece of literature from the IUE exclaimed. “American workers want a real union. They want a union that works for them; not the Communist Party.” In short order, the IUE had become the much larger organization, representing five times as many workers as the UE.
On the surface, it might have seemed as though Carey’s anti-UE agenda would endear him to Boulware. After all, the two had a common enemy in the nation’s Communists. Any such buddying up was not to be, however. Carey “marched triumphantly back in to the General Electric Company bargaining conference room in 1950 expecting to be treated as a conquering hero who had delivered the employees and the company from communism,” said Herbert Northrup, an employee-relations consultant to Boulware. “Instead of accolades, Carey found that the congeniality at the top corporate level, which had characterized the early collective bargaining days under Swope, had vanished.”
What greeted Carey was what would soon become widely known—and pejoratively so in labor circles—as “Boulwarism.” The idea was to move away from the usual negotiating process in which the union would ask for way more than it thought it would get, and the company would offer far less than it thought it would have to give, only to meet somewhere in the middle. “There is no sense in having to go through a lot of rigmarole as though we were a bunch of thieves haggling over some stolen trinket in a flea-bitten Eastern bazaar,” GE said in one of its newsletters. Rather, under Boulwarism, GE put forward an offer that it deemed “feasible and fair” given its level of profit and its commitment to balancing the interests of all of its stakeholders. In GE’s eyes, no dickering was required; this was truly the best the company could do after considerable study of the relevant details—all part of what Boulware said was “trying to do right voluntarily.”
The company would then do two things: First, it would put the terms of the offer into effect for all of its nonunion workers and give the IUE a deadline to accept the package. If the union missed the date, any monetary increase would not be retroactive for its members. Next, GE would take its case directly to the rank-and-file, as Boulware’s unceasing salesmanship continued. “It must now be obvious to our employees,” the company said, “that membership in a union will not get them anything they would not be able to get without a union.” Admitted one CIO official: “Mr. Boulware has created excellent employee relations and very bad union relations.”
Boulware put on quite a show. On the day that union and corporate negotiators sat down to face each other in New York, “local company managements would gather workers together… as captive audiences,” one union man who was part of the bargaining recalled. “Supervisors distributed literature containing the company terms and the promotion therefor. Similar material would be found in full-page ads in community newspapers. Instead of one grand opening in Manhattan, there were a hundred or so, all timed, scheduled, and run off like clockwork as if by pushbutton signal from GE headquarters.” As for the man with his finger on the button, he insisted that there was “nothing new or unorthodox or even experimental” about what GE was doing. “It is simply aimed at pleasing people with jobs in exactly the same way our company’s product marketing program has been pleasing people with products for seventy-five years,” Boulware said.
To Carey, all this talk of “job marketing” was bunk, and the company’s claims of truth and fairness rang even more hollow. In his view, Boulware’s take-it-or-leave-it tactics had but one purpose: to undermine the basic integrity of collective bargaining. And Carey wasn’t about to roll over. As a ten-year-old boy, he liked to brag, he had led his Philadelphia schoolmates in a classroom strike against excessive homework. Carey was a bantam, small in physical stature but profane and truculent, once telling a company negotiator in the middle of contract talks: “I’ll break every bone in your body. Damn it, I’ll come over there and bust you right in the mouth.” One union man remembered that they had to change the ashtrays in the bargaining room to aluminum because Carey would smash the glass ones.
But for all his brashness, Carey was now limited in his effectiveness. This was in part because of the IUE’s constant fighting with the UE—an “orgy of interunion conflict,” as the historian Ronald Schatz has written—and in part because of frequent jockeying for control within the IUE itself. In 1950, for example, Carey called for a chain of “rolling strikes” against GE, only to have the big IUE local in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, vote against the plan, effectively killing it. Carey came out of the meeting at Pittsfield High School, in which he had unsuccessfully sought strike authorization, burning mad. “Why those S.O.B.s would have treated Charlie Wilson better than they treated me,” Carey said. In 1952, Carey threatened a nationwide strike against GE, but several locals again shut him down.
IUE members at GE did win wage gains through the early 1950s—3 percent in 1950, 2.5 percent in 1951 and 1952, a shade over 3 percent in 1953, and a shade under 3 percent in 1954—plus cost-of-living increases and other benefits: pension coverage, insurance, and holidays. But each round of contract talks was difficult, and IUE members didn’t receive the full pay increases they would have enjoyed had the union settled sooner and met GE’s deadline for retroactivity to kick in. Boulwarism was taking a real bite. All along, the epithets flew between Boulware and Carey. “Even after Mr. Boulware goes,” the union leader said, “he will leave scars it will take years and years to heal.” Boulware belittled Carey as an “unsound, unwise, untruthful, and ineffective representative of our employees.”
As the two sides prepared for negotiations in 1955, the acrimony showed no signs of letting up. In January, Carey told a group of IUE locals that they weren’t just fighting for themselves anymore. “Make no mistake about it,” he said. “Boulwarism will spread to other sections of our industry and to other industries also if we permit it to succeed in General Electric.… In a strict sense, therefore, our fight against Boulwarism is the fight of all organized labor.” This wasn’t just a theory. Westinghouse, Sylvania Electric Products, North American Aviation, Goodyear Tire, and some of the steelmakers had in the past year started trying out versions of GE’s labor policies.
By spring, Boulware was bracing for a full-blown work stoppage. “Carey very much wants a companywide strike this year regardless of what the offer is,” he said. But while the rancor remained the same, one thing had changed: the nation’s economic outlook. A ten-month recession in 1953 and ’54 had dictated that the previous package GE offered to its workers “was thin,” Northrup said. “This required the hard sell and tough stance for Boulware’s ‘job marketers.’” But now, things were looking up—way up. As bargaining began in July, GE reported record earnings for the first half of 1955. One of the company’s goals “is a staggering 10 percent profit after taxes on sales,” David Lasser, the IUE’s research director, told Carey. “GE is approaching this.” With such rosy financial results, there was no way for GE to escape making a generous offer. The question was what it would get in return. “In 1955,” Northrup said, “the aim was long-term peace to prepare for the projected long-term boom.”
The union had gone into the talks with a bold demand: “a guaranteed annual wage” for its members, which would ensure a worker received 85 percent or more of his pay for up to an entire year of unemployment. In response, the company tried to lower expectations. “Naturally, no one ever gets all he wants in every respect,” GE said in its employee-relations newsletter. Carey was the sort to dig in on an issue like the guaranteed annual wage. But, as luck would have it, just as Walter Reuther was sidelined for most of the UAW’s talks with GM in 1948 while he recovered from his gunshot wound, Carey fell ill during the GE negotiations. When he did show up, Boulware occupied him—the stocky, six-foot-three executive towering over Carey—so the actual thrust and parry at the bargaining table was left to others. Prenegotiation conferences had also helped to allay certain problem areas in advance.
Not that the atmosphere was suddenly amiable. As in the past, the exchange between GE’s chief negotiator, Virgil Day, and the IUE bargainers—Lasser, John Callahan, and Leo Jandreau—became very heated at times, with each side accusing the other of “scurrilous attacks”:
CALLAHAN. Isn’t it true that the company made deals with the UE… and Communists in Louisville to beat us there?
DAY. That’s a libelous statement, and we could sue.
LASSER. You had captive audience meetings to have workers bring pressure on their stewards, stewards on their officers, etc.
DAY. We express our views. We think it’s in the best interest of the union.
JANDREAU. Suppose it worked in reverse—if our stewards were allowed to call a meeting in the plant to bring pressure on the foremen?
DAY. The union in Schenectady and other locations has been spreading the theory of work stoppages, which is in violation of the law and the contract, and we are going to look down the barrel of a gun to correct the situation.
Despite the sniping, GE and the IUE worked briskly through the meat of the contract. The union didn’t get its guaranteed annual wage, but the company agreed to the richest accord in its history, including a sizable wage increase, cost-of-living protection, and substantial improvements in health, life insurance, and pension coverage. For the IUE negotiators, the rub was that GE wanted the pact to extend for five years—and that made them nervous. “A lot can happen in five years,” Callahan said. “You would have an opportunity… to close down operations and move them to lower-paid areas. Furthermore, we would have no job security and might be at the mercy of the company. We’re not happy about this.” But Day wouldn’t budge. “We’re serious about the structure of confidence and stability” that such a lengthy agreement would bring.
The IUE’s protests didn’t go on for long. On August 12—more than a month before the expiration of the existing contract—the union accepted the GE package. The wage jump, nearly 20 percent over the five years, and the other provisions were too much to pass up. Boulware was gleeful. “You may as well take this,” he said, handing Callahan his necktie. “You’ve taken everything else I have.” Carey called it “a splendid settlement.” So did Boulware. “We are maturing into a kind of relationship that people ought to have,” Boulware said. “After all, we are dealing with a $1.2 billion payroll that affects 500,000 people. This is serious and it ought to be handled in a businesslike way.” Said Carey: “I believe that this new contract can provide new and better foundations for labor relations in General Electric.”
Such optimism would soon fade. But for now, at least, Lem Boulware and Jim Carey had shown that, with all the money sloshing around in 1950s America, it was possible to buy labor peace even at GE.